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Kitabı oku: «The Frozen Lake: A gripping novel of family and wartime secrets», sayfa 3

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FIVE
Yorkshire

Perdita Richardson hadn’t expected a letter from her best friend Ursula Grindley, not so near the end of term. Yet there it was, tucked into a tattered old copy of the Couperin Suites by an obliging and well-bribed school maid.

Letters at Yorkshire Ladies College, where Perdita was a boarder, were considered dangerous items and reading an illicit letter was almost as much of a problem as receiving it, for the young ladies were constantly watched. Twenty seconds in a practice room without playing a note and a teacher would be at the door wanting to know why you were slacking. Hawk eyes bored into you in the library, as you went along the corridor, in the dining room; spies were everywhere in dormitories and common room. The lavatory was a possibility, but there were set times for that, and usually a queue outside the door.

Perdita broke into a ripple of arpeggios with her left hand while she tucked the letter into her liberty bodice with her right hand. Later, she would contrive to slip it inside her sock, and then, in the afternoon, she would work the frayed lace trick.

‘I don’t know what it is with you and bootlaces, Perdita Richardson. Yours are always breaking.’ The brick-faced games mistress suspected a ruse, but couldn’t deny that there was the lace in two pieces, and, on inspection, it had suffered what appeared to be a natural breakage with appropriate fraying.

‘I think it’s because my hockey boots are too small for me,’ said Perdita helpfully. ‘It must put a strain on the laces.’

‘See you are supplied with a new pair of boots for next term. Go and put in a spare lace. Be back in five minutes.’

She could stretch that to seven or eight, Perdita thought as she jogged back to the changing rooms. Once there, she tugged off the offending boot, one she’d taken from the lost property box, and pulled on her own boot with its perfectly good lace. Then she sat down on the wooden lockers, plucked the letter from its hiding place in her sock and began to read.

It started without any preamble – a precaution in case it should fall into hostile hands.

Very near the end of term, I know, but I had to write to tell you all the news as there’s a terrific to-do going on here. The chief reason is that the family Black Sheep will shortly be with us – in case you don’t know who that is, it’s my Uncle Hal. You never met him – nor did I, or if I did I was a mere puling infant & don’t remember it – because he went off years and years ago, to America! Yes, that one!

Well, the fuss, you’d think some arch-criminal was on his way. And the point is, I can’t find out that he ever actually did anything very terrible, except to take up acting when he was at Cambridge and then head for London to Go On The Stage! That was before he went to America. I mean, what’s so shocking about an actor, only you know what Daddy’s like, he shouts and rants about ‘Those Sort of People’? He says actors are a bunch of Pansies and then goes red if he thinks I’ve heard – he imagines I don’t know what he means. Musicians and painters are Pansies, too, of course – if they’re men. If they’re women, they’re badly brought up with no allure and probably thick ankles who should have been controlled by their fathers. He doesn’t get any less Victorian as he gets older. He should control his temper, never mind his daughter – all that going red can’t be doing him any good at all.

I asked Nanny to tell me about Hal. She has a soft spot for him, you can tell that at once. She let out that his brothers called him the Afterthought, because he’s so much younger than they are. He’s thirty-eight, she says, and Pa’s fifty-five, and Uncle Roger fifty-two, so it’s quite a gap, I do see. Grandma must have been awfully old to have a baby when he was born. One thing is, he didn’t come back from America when Grandma died, and that’s held against him, BUT, Nanny says that Daddy didn’t send the cablegram until he knew it was too late for him to get here for the funeral.

It isn’t only the acting that’s causing all the agitation. It’s money. Isn’t that always the way with my family? Hal got a third of the business when Grandpa died, and that still rankles with Daddy – considering he got the house as well as shares and so on, I don’t think he’s being very fair. Anyhow, they reckoned that being an actor and no good at it – well, no one’s ever heard of him, have they? – he’d have sold his shares, spent the money and be living in penury. Only he hasn’t, they’re all still in his name. There’s some deal brewing, and they need his shares to put it all through. Hence the flap – will he be difficult about it?

The Grindleys are gathering. Uncle Roger and Aunt Angela have arrived, with Cecy. Uncle Roger’s still being beastly about her training to be a doctor. Aunt Angela says Hal is a nice man, only not in the least interested in sport and shooting and all that. He was clever, too, and you know how suspicious Daddy is of anyone clever, books and plays and things all being a waste of time and not in the real world, meaning lav pans and baths. You don’t know how lucky you are that your family’s money comes from dull old engineering works and not from sanitary chinaware. Nicky knocked a boy down this term because he got so fed up with remarks about things going down the pan. He’s at home, therefore, in disgrace, but he doesn’t care a bit; he hates school.

Anyhow, that’s not all. Exquisite Eve (my new name for my awful stepmother, don’t you like it?) has set her mind against Hal, don’t ask me why, and says he shouldn’t have just announced he was coming but should have waited to be invited. He’d have had to wait a jolly long time in that case. Aunt Angela says, ‘Rot, it’s his home,’ or words to that effect, but Eve isn’t pleased. Then a cable came from Lisbon mentioning the name of his ship, the SS Gloriana. When Uncle Roger heard that, he cried out, ‘That’s not on the Atlantic run, it’s a P&O vessel and goes to and from India and Australia.’ So that’s got them even more worked up, did he get the letters about the shares that they sent to New York, and what on earth could he be doing in Australia and India? As if no one ever went there before, which of course they do, all the time.

My stepsister Rosalind will be turning up from her finishing school in Munich. You haven’t met her, but I’ve told you how ghastly she is – well, she would be, with exquisite Eve for a mother. Daddy thinks she’s wonderful, he goes on and on about her poise and beautiful manners and grooming – you’d think she was a horse. Only she isn’t, she’s frightfully pretty in a boring, brittle sort of way, and very affected. She behaves as though the Hall is a leftover from the Middle Ages (she’s got a point there), and treats me like I was some kind of a peasant. Simon can’t take his eyes off her, I never saw anything so soppy, and he won’t hear a word against her. He’s home from Cambridge, and gloomy as usual, he knows that Daddy won’t hear of him joining the army after university; the eldest son has to go into the business, and that’s that. Honestly, my brothers, what a pair, but at least Nicky isn’t at all struck by the fair Rosalind. Just wait till you see her.

Must finish, or there’ll be so many pages you won’t be able to flush them down the lav, hope it’s a Jowetts, we need to keep the money coming in to pay for Rosalind’s expensive clothes and Eve’s beauty treatments. Oh, and guess what, we’re going to have a dance over Christmas, hooray, but it’s in honour of Rosalind’s seventeenth birthday. It makes me sick. Catch Daddy ever giving a dance in my honour.

Can’t wait to see you and have a really good talk about it all, xxx

PS Cecy says she’s been trying to persuade E’s twin (better not mention her name) to come back for Christmas. I hope she does.

SIX
London, Bloomsbury

Edwin had met Lidia on the steps of the Photographic Institute in London. To be exact, he had tripped over her; she had been on her knees, scrubbing, and he hadn’t been looking where he was going.

‘Blöder Idiot,’ she exclaimed.

‘Oh, Entschuldigung, ich habe Sie nicht gesehen,’ he replied, startled. ‘I’ve knocked over your bucket,’ he continued in English.

‘It is nothing,’ she muttered, getting to her feet and wiping her hands on her worn crossover apron. Why was the man staring at her like that?

‘I am sorry,’ he said again. ‘May I take the bucket in for you?’

She clutched the bucket to her chest, and backed away. ‘No, no. It would be most unsuitable.’

Edwin didn’t give a fig about what was or wasn’t suitable. He took the bucket firmly from her and followed her down the basement steps to deposit it in the area. Then he went back up to the pavement, and, lighting a cigarette, took up a position by the railings.

He didn’t have long to wait before she came up the steps, dressed now in a shabby, dark coat and a nondescript hat. ‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Why are you still here?’

‘I’m waiting for you. Have you finished your work for now? Then I shall buy you a cup of coffee. No, don’t protest, it’s the least I can do after sending your bucket flying.’

He walked her quite a way, to a place he knew of near Harrods. A Hungarian pastry chef had opened a hugely successful tea room, where his exquisite cakes and pastries were bought and sampled by appreciative members of the upper classes.

She didn’t hang back at the door, despite her poor clothes, but lifted her chin and went in. The proprietor eyed her with momentary disapproval, then took in the well-cut, if casual, clothes of her companion and ushered them to a table.

Edwin ordered coffee and pastries. ‘I don’t have to ask a Viennese if she likes these,’ he said with a smile.

‘How do you know I come from Vienna?’

‘Your accent. I studied in Vienna for a while.’

‘You don’t have a Viennese accent.’

‘No, I learnt my German as a child, from a German governess.’

‘Do you always stare at people? Isn’t this rude, for an Englishman?’

He wasn’t at all abashed. ‘I’m a photographer. I always stare when I see something or someone I want to take photographs of.’

The light died out of her face, and her big dark eyes became wary. ‘Photographs?’

‘Not the kind you’re thinking of,’ he said quickly. ‘Nothing distasteful or dishonourable.’

That was what she was thinking, of course. You didn’t arrive as a penniless but attractive refugee to any country without certain suggestions being made to you. Had she chosen that route, she would never have had to scrub a step, and she wouldn’t be wearing these clothes. She said no more, but took a bite of her Marillenkuchen and with that delicious apricot mouthful, all her memories of Vienna, pushed so resolutely out of her mind, came flooding back. She smiled.

She couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t have dreamt of the effect it would have on Edwin, who sat transfixed, gazing at her with blank astonishment.

He had thought she had an interesting face. The arrangement of cheekbones and nose and mouth appealed to him, as an artist, not as a man. Now he was overwhelmed.

She didn’t want to meet him again, didn’t want to be photographed, wanted to be left alone. She didn’t notice him following her through dingy streets to a house in Bloomsbury. As she put her key in the lock of the front door, which badly needed a coat of paint, she looked around and up and down the street, as though she sensed his eyes upon her; he had ducked behind a parked van, and she didn’t see him.

He sauntered around the corner and went into a shop that announced itself as a newsagent and tobacconist. A small man with a moustache stood behind the counter, and he greeted Edwin in a voice that held a trace of a foreign accent. Edwin bought a paper and a packet of cigarettes.

There were no other customers in the shop, and it wasn’t hard to fall into conversation with the man. Edwin’s relaxed, unassertive ways encouraged people to talk to him, and in no time at all, he had the rundown on everyone in Cranmer Street, including the inhabitants of number sixteen. The owners of the house were an elderly couple, who let out rooms to add to a meagre pension. Their only lodgers at present were a young married couple. The man was English, his wife from Austria. Also staying there for some weeks now was the wife’s sister, recently arrived from Vienna.

‘A musician,’ the little man said, his eyes gleaming with pleasure. ‘She plays the piano. For hours. Bach, mostly, and Scarlatti. Beautiful, beautiful.’ Then the eyes became watchful. ‘You are from the authorities, perhaps?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ Edwin said, taken aback. ‘Do I look like a policeman?’

‘It is not only the police, but there are Home Office officials, who come and ask unpleasant questions in areas like this. There are a lot of foreigners here. But Mrs Jenkins, the musician’s sister, is married to an Englishman, she has a British passport, I have seen it, I know what it looks like. I was once a German, but now I, too, have a British passport.’

‘Does the sister have a passport?’

‘Only an Austrian one, if that. She has come as a refugee, her brother-in-law arranged it. It wasn’t easy, because he’s a writer, and has little money. However, Mrs Jenkins works, and earns some money, and so they managed it. Mrs Jenkins was very worried about her sister, for they are Jews, like me. It isn’t safe to be Jewish these days.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Edwin said inadequately. ‘I’m aware that Mrs Jenkins’s sister – I don’t recall her name …?’ He looked expectantly at the newsagent.

‘Weiss. Lidia Weiss.’

‘Miss Weiss has a cleaning job. Surely, if she is a musician she shouldn’t be scrubbing floors?’

The man shook his head, making clucking noses. ‘No, no, of course not. It is terrible for her hands. Musicians have to be careful of their hands, and the water, and the cold, it isn’t good for bones and muscles. Only what work is there for a musician, newly arrived in this country? They are two a penny. I myself know a cellist of international reputation who stays alive by washing up at a restaurant. A violinist, a wonderful artist, is a lavatory attendant – and the stories he tells about what goes on in such a place, it makes your hair stand on end, the English are a strange people. A friend of mine who is a horn player is more fortunate, he is a big, strong fellow, and he is employed by a nightclub. On the door.’ The little man spread his hands in a despairing gesture. ‘Lidia Weiss is lucky, she is well-educated, she speaks good English. If she didn’t, it would be difficult for her even to get a cleaning job.’

‘I see,’ Edwin said.

It took him two days to scrape an acquaintance with Richard Jenkins, a thin, likeable young man engaged in writing a long novel set in mediaeval Wales. This work was to make his fortune; Edwin doubted it, and when he went back with Richard to take potluck at the evening meal, he saw that Lidia doubted it too, but was too kind to say so. He had handed the food he had thoughtfully brought with him to a relieved Anna Jenkins, who had been wondering how she could make an already watery tomato soup and a tin of sardines feed four people, and then turned around to be introduced to Lidia. She looked at him as though she had seen a ghost.

Although they hadn’t met before, Richard moved in much the same London circle as Edwin, and they had friends in common among the Bohemian group of writers, artists and musicians endeavouring to live by their various talents. By the end of the evening, Lidia seemed to have shed her mistrust of Edwin. She sat down at the battered old piano after supper and played for them. Edwin didn’t take his eyes off her, his gaze moving from her rapt face to her reddened, swollen hands.

She visited him in the rooms he kept in London, one of which was rigged up as a small studio. The first time she came, she brought her sister Anna with her. Then, finally, after further tea-time outings to sample Viennese pastries, a recital at the Queen’s Hall, ‘A friend asked me to use the tickets, such a shame to waste them,’ he lied, and an evening at the cinema, she came to his rooms alone.

She refused to marry him.

‘Why, why?’ he would ask her in despair as they lay side by side on his narrow bed. ‘What’s wrong with me? I’m so much in love with you, don’t you feel anything for me?’

‘Nothing is wrong with you, but everything is wrong with me. I am foreign, and Jewish, and Richard tells me that you come from an important, rich family. They would hate me. Then, I’m older than you, and men should be older than the women they marry.’

‘Four years! It’s hardly a generation. One of my aunts is married to a man fifteen years her junior, and they are very happy.’

‘Even so. And besides …’ It was hard to tell him that she slept with him for the release and comfort it gave her, not because she was in love with him. She craved human warmth and company, desperate to drown her grief at her parents’ death in a railway accident, to forget for a short while the loss of her first lover, a Berliner who had vanished into one of the KZ camps for some minor act of disobedience to the State, and had died there in mysterious circumstances. After making love she wept on Edwin’s shoulder, for the people who were gone, for the country she had loved, for the Jews who were left.

Edwin had never in his life been exposed to such raw emotion, he wanted to detach himself from it, yet ended by finding himself even more deeply in love with his brown-haired Viennese refugee.

She was a harpsichordist, not a pianist, he learnt. Which was not a good thing to be, because if good pianos were hard to come by, harpsichords of any kind were impossible. Edwin pleaded with her to give up her cleaning job, to come and live with him if she wouldn’t marry him, but she refused, and twice a week went to classes, paid for out of her slender earnings, to learn shorthand and typing.

Edwin had to return to the north. He begged her to come with him. His studio there wasn’t in his parents’ house, he told her, but on the ground floor of a house in the local town. ‘I own the whole house, there are bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen. It’s a small town, but friendly. The air is good, there are hills,’ he added helplessly.

She shook her head, and got out of bed to dress in her worn clothes and go off to attend to the steps of the Photographic Institute. Edwin went around to Cranmer Street, and railed at her sister, Anna, who looked at him with pity in her eyes.

‘It will be better for her when she has another job. It will be better for her when she can work indoors, and use her mind, and not have her hands in water all day. Then she can play properly, and remember what she is.’

Like you, thought Edwin, although he was too kind to say so. Like Anna, who had a degree in chemistry, and was grateful for the job of laboratory assistant at a girls’ school.

‘Please persuade her. None of this is because I feel sorry for her, you do understand that?’

‘I know. It is because you love her. Sadly, love comes at no one’s bidding, and so …’ She shrugged.

The scrubbing got no easier, when Edwin had gone, and the piano playing became more and more painful and difficult. Edwin wrote to her every day, passionate letters, and sent her photographs, of fells and lakes and ruined chapels.

‘What an artist!’ Richard said, when he saw them.

Lidia agreed, as she put them silently away in the bottom of the tatty suitcase where she kept all her worldly possessions. She cooked supper; Anna was feeling unwell. She often felt sick these days, she said the smell of the chemicals at school was upsetting her. She knew this wasn’t the reason, and so did Lidia, but neither of them spoke about it.

More letters, more photographs, this time of snow scenes, sunlit and moonlit, an enchanted world, it seemed to Lidia. Do you skate? he wrote. I know, that’s like asking a duck if it quacks. I remember you telling me about Christmas in the mountains. They will soon be skating on the lake here.

Then Anna told Richard her news, and he was ecstatic, brushing aside her worry about her job – they thought she was unmarried; where was the money to come from? Richard’s thin face took on a determined look, and three days later he announced that he had accepted a job. Teaching at a preparatory school for boys in Sussex, a live-in job with a small house provided. No, she wasn’t to exclaim about his writing. Schoolmasters had long holidays, he’d been a fool not to find such a job long ago. Yes, he would miss London, but country air and food were what his Anna needed at a time like this. He was to take up his post at the beginning of the Lent term, but might move into the house whenever he wished.

Of course, Lidia must come too, he said.

Lidia looked at her sister’s tired but radiant face. ‘Later perhaps,’ she said, and arranged to work all the extra hours she could, to pay for the train fare to the north and to buy a pair of skates.

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Yaş sınırı:
0+
Litres'teki yayın tarihi:
27 aralık 2018
Hacim:
494 s. 7 illüstrasyon
ISBN:
9780007438273
Telif hakkı:
HarperCollins
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